When the Game Just Hates You
by Najio
Summary: When Tyx, enchanting expert, accidentally invokes ancient blood magic, he is forced to travel the world in search of a way to reverse the spell. Warring factions, diamond shortages, and an army of charged creepers only makes things worse. Can the five nations of Minecraftia stop fighting long enough to defeat the evil Steve? Rated T for very light swearing.
1. Runes and Regulations

**Hmm… I'm supposed to have stuff to say in the first A/N, aren't I? Er, well, review I guess!**

**As much as it would make my day, month, year, and possibly my existence, I did not develop Minecraft or write PJO. :,(**

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The torch guttered, launching tiny shards of redstone into the air. Its sharp metallic odor mixed with the musty aroma of old books and mold, filling the cave with an off-putting smell most people couldn't tolerate‒ but Tyx wasn't most people. He loved this place, everything from the smell to the cool, damp air to the eerie red glow of his redstone torches. Books surrounded the spot where he sat cross-legged on the floor, piled up on shelves that filled every nook and cranny of his basement library. There were books of prophesy written by ancient sages from the time before enchanting even existed, scrolls dedicated to the proper care of baby slimes, and even history books about cow genocide.

A particularly yellow page of a particularly moldy book was open on his lap, covered in Standard Galactic Runes and pictures of various ores. It was his favorite book, full of funny stories about idiots who thought they could just dig straight down to get this _one_ bit of obsidian…

Tyx had a rather morbid sense of humor, he knew. Still, _everyone_ knew that obsidian formed on lava lakes, and anyone who insisted on mucking around anyway deserved to lose their diamond pickaxe.

He leaned back, resting his head on the dusty leather spines of the books behind him.

"Tyx!" someone shouted, batting at the side of his face. He turned his head, alarmed, but no one was there. "Tyx!" they shouted again, and he felt something jab him in the stomach, hard. "Get up you bloody useless lump!" The cave began to fade, colors fading away into black-and-white. His smell was slowly fading away, replaced by the odor of wool and sweat.

"GET UP!" the voice bellowed, jolting Tyx out of his dream.

"Mmph…" he mumbled, desperately clinging to the fading memory. Another slap connected with his ear, making his head ring. His eyes snapped open, and he obediently began wriggling sideways. Once again, he was holding up the line. A major design flaw of the barracks was that if someone was still asleep, there wasn't much anyone else could do about it. It was not made for comfort. It was built to cram as many beds into a single room as physically possible, with little to no regard for how in the name of Notch anyone was supposed to sleep well. They were stacked no less than six high, with the bottom bunks in danger of collapsing and the top ones very nearly scraping the ceiling. One topic of much lively debate was where the optimal place was in that crush of wool, blankets, and sleeping bodies.

Some said that the top was the best place, despite the few inches of extra space all the other rows offered, as there was zero danger of being crushed by a metric ton of sleeping soldiers if a bedpost shattered, as one inevitably would. Others argued that the bottom was best; its members could slip out from the middle of the row without having to wait for however many people to awkwardly squirm out from their cramped sleeping place and climb down the ladder. Plus, the bottom got out first while the top had to wait for everyone else.

The ladder was how those in the top few rows were expected to get in and out of bed, although falling was much more popular for the latter task. It was set in one wall, going right from the floor to the ceiling. While some few had mastered the art of squirming out from between their sheets, grabbing a rung, and swinging down into a standing position…

_Thud!_ Tyx had not. Massaging the back of his head where he'd banged it on the way down, he struggled to his feet. Another problem with the top row, where he himself slept, was that there was farther to fall.

Bed slots were assigned randomly, and he had the misfortune to end up right next to the ladder. This meant that every morning, when the alarm noteblock outside completely failed to wake him up (Whose idea was it to make the wake-up call sound like a piano anyway?!), his bunkmate Grease would poke and prod him until he got moving. Grease wasn't particularly gentle, nor patient.

Maybe it made sense to stick him in the slot with the least space. Tyx was built like a feather; light, thin, and completely useless in combat. In a pinch, he could tickle his enemies, but one good puff and he went flying. Kandy, their leader, had taken this into account. (Her full name was technically KandyCrushh. She let people call her Kandy, but didn't tolerate anyone referring to her as Candy, KandyCrush, CandyCrushh, or, Notch forbid, Candy Crush. She really could _hear_ the extra h.) He was never assigned to anything that remotely resembled physical labor, and instead spent his days pouring over magic books, offering counsel (which she ignored), and enchanting weapons.

It made sense; Tyx was a wizard before he came to the Stronghold. He would give people's weapons and armor buffs in exchange for various items, or just basic food and supplies. Now, he was stuck in a castle built by one of many factions Tyx had wanted to be independent from.

There were perks of course. For one thing, he had access to all the books in the castle. Unfortunately, all the books in the castle meant less than an eighth of his collection back home.

Hastily running his fingers through his moss-green hair in a pathetic attempt at personal hygiene and rubbing the sleep from his yellow eyes, he ducked through the barracks door and into the crisp night air. Tyx had really come to hate, despise, and wish eternal Nether-fire on nighttime. He, like any other Minecraftian, nursed a healthy mistrust of night and darkness in general, but no one had seen the sun in nearly a year. Somehow, some idiot had decided that it would be _hilarious_ to rig up some kind of eternal night machine. Every 'morning,' just before the sun peeked out above the horizon, it would suddenly and inexplicably trade places with the moon.

Besides screwing with everyone's sleep schedules, this made leaving the Stronghold, well, suicide. Mobs were constantly spawning everywhere outside the castle's walls. At any given time, one could see at _least_ a dozen creepers from the tops of one of the many towers adorning the high battlements that kept their faction safe.

The Stronghold was essentially a big wall with a couple of towers and a few buildings inside. They were about as pressed for space as it was possible to be, which was why the barracks were so incredibly… compact. Generals ‒ and Kandy ‒ got their own rooms, but 'personal quarters' were only three by three blocks, which used to be considered basic needs, and piled one on top of another in a tall tower.

Cramped it might be, but the Stronghold was easily the safest place for kilometers around, far more than a day's walking distance from Skyland, which was the nearest other haven for players. In short, it was either live behind the castle walls or surrender your brains to the nearest zombie. The walls themselves were _impressive_, to say the least. Five blocks thick, if you counted their hollow center. Well, not exactly hollow. Each wall's center was completely filled with lava. It had taken a _lot_ of Nether-diving and several deaths, but eventually a pretty much impregnable fortress had been built.

The thing about impregnable fortresses, though, was that they needed gates. Gates tended to defeat the purpose of a lava-filled wall, as covering a gate with lava rather defeated the purpose. Unless you had the materials to make as many fire-resistance potions as you wanted, on demand. Which they didn't. Not even kind of. The perfect solution, or so they had found so far, was to set up a dispenser and dump lava across the entrance whenever it wasn't being used. Bam, impenetrable walls _and_ gate!

That said, keeping thirty or so Minecraftians (People not known for their easy-going natures) cooped up in a very small area, supported only by an eighteen block square plot of farmland and the occasional farm animal was such an _incredibly _bad idea that Tyx really didn't have the words. Soldiers put each other in the hospital over small arguments almost daily, draining the already meager potions supply, and the eternal night didn't improve _anyone's _mood.

Tyx would give just about anything to get the Nether out of there. Except his life. So, he was stuck.

First stop, farm. No one could enchant on an empty stomach, although he was _so_ sick of eating potato and carrot soup for breakfast that he'd almost prefer spider eyes.

Once he arrived at the field and was handed his breakfast rations (One bowl of depressingly flavorless stew and a loaf of bread), he quickly turned an about-face and tried very hard not to start running. He _may _have had a bit of a crush on Tracy, their resident cook. He really _would_ rather be eaten alive by silverfish than admit it, though, so he tried to avoid her as much as possible.

Sighing, he made his way through the twisty alleyways that led from his sleeping quarters to his workplace. Tyx rarely ever did anything except work, eat, and sleep, mostly because there wasn't anything _else_ to do. Back in the golden age, you could just hang out in a tavern, eat some mushroom stew. Lots of places would even have a jukebox and a Cat disc. 'Course, no one in their right mind wasted diamonds on jukeboxes anymore. Just about all of them had been lost. Some bandit makes off with a joint's music player, falls into some lava lake on the way home, and no more jukebox. Guys who rob random clubs in search of diamonds don't tend to be the brightest of people.

Finally, Tyx arrived at the only other building he regularly visited. He didn't do much else besides read, actually. Technically, everyone was allowed a day off now and then to spend chatting with their buddies or sniping creepers. Kandy wasn't fond of that particular pastime, as it was a waste of valuable bows and arrows, but Notch, it was _fun_. Okay, he _had_ done that once or twice. Revenge was sweet. Still, he never spent his spare time talking with his friends. Actually, he didn't have friends… probably becasue he didn't like _people_ all that much.

Most likely a symptom of spending the last ten years or so of his life as a hermit, Tyx was uncomfortable around fellow humans, hated conversation with a passion, and had a terror of crowds that exceeded his fear of finding Herobrine himself under his bed. It made living in close quarters with 30 other people about as much fun as sleeping in a creeper dog pile. So, he hid in the library.

Wincing as his bare feet touched the freezing cold floor of the Crafting Tower, which housed everything from furnaces to brewing stands, Tyx jogged across the tiny first floor to the ladder. He probably should ask Kandy about some leather boots. Armor was usually iron, which was _useless_ against cold floors, and only given to those who tended to tank damage. Or take damage. Or see mobs. Still, he _was_ the only one in the entire Stronghold who could read Standard Galactic, the language of enchantment. Why it was called Standard Galactic, instead of something magic-sounding like Standard Wizard, he had no idea, but the little squiggles and dots made almost _more_ sense to him than English. Surely that entitled him to a lousy pair of cow hide slippers!

Although… you didn't strictly _need_ to read Standard Galactic to enchant. Not that Tyx was planning on telling anyone that anytime soon. Someday, he'd find a correlation between the seemingly random words on the pages of the _Book of Mysteries_ and the resulting enchants. The fact that he'd twice enchanted swords with _The Cold Wet Water_ and gotten Fire Aspect was irrelevant.

Tyx, who wasn't the most athletic person, was gasping for breath by the time he had hauled himself up onto the third floor of the Tower. He breathed in the smell of books, hoping for that comforting scent he missed so much… but it wasn't the same. Still, it was books, and that was what he was good with. Never, ever people. Books didn't talk back.

He curled up contentedly in his wooden chair. It wasn't very comfortable, as it was basically a block of wood carved into an L shape with a couple of planks slapped onto the sides, but it was as close to home as he could get in this castle.

Open on the enchanting table, pages flapping absently, was the _Book of Mysteries_. No one had written it, and no one could read it in its entirety. It opened to whatever page it bloody well _felt _like opening too, and really couldn't care less about what you wanted. After all, _you_ were just some human, not a supernatural tome wished into existence by Notch himself.

Okay, maybe some books _did_ talk back.

Placing his bowl on the enchanting table ‒ the priceless enchanting table that had bloody _diamonds_ embedded in the corners, diamonds that were now smeared with stew ‒ Tyx lifted the spoon to his mouth.

"Alright," Tyx said around the wooden spoon. He had developed the habit of talking to the book long before he came here. It was perhaps the only thing that remained of his old home, as every single enchanting table ever made simply _had_ a copy of it, no matter what the original book used in crafting had been. A lonely hermit enchanter really didn't have anything else to speak with, and if you were going to talk to an inanimate object it might as well be an incredibly magical and mysterious one.

Also, there was a good chance it was a sentient being, so it didn't hurt to be polite.

"What have you got for me today?" he asked, peering at the open page. Naturally, it wasn't the one he'd left off on yesterday. Well, approximately eight hours ago. It was hard to have a yester_day_ without first having proper days.

Squinting at the runes, he froze.

_Gnidnib fo lautir eht._ He was _sure_ he'd translated that right. Well, pages of the _Book of Mysteries_ often read like complete gibberish. Ah, there was a second bit! _And the imbuing of Their golden blood_

Ah… this was _most unusual_. He should probably run away; unusual things happening tended to mean that there had been a secret update. For all he knew, this was a new way to summon the Wither.

Or, it could be Sharpness X or something. He should really use a diamond sword just in case…

That was completely against regulations. Kandy didn't want him wasting diamond equipment on unknown enchantments. Instead, he was supposed to copy the enchantments into books, and apply them to the special gear later. Pfft, regulations shmegulations. He was a bloody _wizard_, he could do what he wanted! Kandy couldn't kill him if he had an uber-enchanted diamond sword anyway. 'Sides, who knew how much magical power it would take to get this new spell from paper to a sword anyway?

He had a chest full of books and weaponry, including one diamond sword that he kept around, just in case Kandy's rules needed some bending. Spoon still between his teeth, he hauled the weapon into his lap.

The spoon fell out of his mouth.

It landed squarely on the page.

It started to glow.

Tyx stared uncomprehendingly at the utensil for at least a minute.

"HEROBRINE'S UNDERPANTS!" he screamed. He'd enchanted a _spoon!_ HE'D ENCHANTED A BLOODY SPOON! _HE'D GIVEN A NOTCH DAMNED SPOON MYSTERIOUS POWERS HE'D PROBABLY NEVER SEE AGAIN!_

"Bloody Nether…" he mumbled, letting his head plop down onto the table with a thud.

"Ouch!" _Note to self, Obsidian is really hard_.

The Notch damned book was _laughing _at him, he just knew it! Well, he should check out what amazing, epic enchantment he'd put on a _spoon_. A spoon. He almost felt like crying.

_Sharpness X,_ it read. _Fire Aspect II. Blood of the Gods I._

Sharpness X. On a spoon. And what in the Nether was _Blood of the Gods?!_

On a spoon.

"Fff‒" he began, but was cut off. A loud _crack_ filled the air with the smell of gunpowder, a flash of light blinding him as he tripped backwards over his chair, still clutching the spoon.

_Oh,_ he thought, his mind finally realizing what _exactly_ the enchantment had said. _Gnidnib fo lautir eht… _was 'The ritual of binding' backwards.

_Ah, Nether…_ he thought, remembering one of the stranger pages in one of the oldest books he'd ever read.

_A backwards incantation has the opposite effect._

He'd just released a demon. Kandy was going to snap and stab him this time, he just _knew_ _it_. Not that he could really blame her. He'd ignored _all _her rules, and now… he wasn't even sure what the Nether he'd done, exactly.

There was another flash of light, another blast of sound, even louder than before. He opened his mouth to swear, but a vicious wind picked up and blew the words right out of his mouth. Books went flying, papers freeing themselves from their bindings and sticking to the walls. Tyx closed his eyes, clutching at the nearest shelf and hoping to Notch he didn't get blown away.

Finally, the noise stopped. The air went still. Tentatively, he opened his eyes.

Someone was sitting on the enchantment table.

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**Eheheh, cliffie. Sorta.**

**I'm not going to include youtubers, but that doesn't mean I can't make references! ):D**

**Remember to review! Please? ****_PWEEEEEASE?!_**** :,3**


	2. Never Say Nether

**Welcome back, to my Minecraft thingy. :P Always, always remember to review! I'm talking to YOU, eight people who've actually read this so far! XD Srsly tho, if you don't review, in all likelihood no one else will either.**

**Indeed, this chapter title needs to die in a fire. It doesn't even feel guilty after all its awful puns!**

**Disclaimer: See that url at the top of the page? … ****_FAN_****fiction… dot net. Yup, not Rick Riordan or Notch.**

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Eleven months, eight days, and four hours, give or take. It had been nearly a year since Gaea had been defeated… so, traditionally, it was time for the next big evil to rise up and try to kill them. Annabeth wondered absently what would be next. Ouranos, maybe?

"Hey," Percy said, from his spot next to her on their picnic blanket. "Are you okay?"

The true answer was that she was jumping at every shadow. "Great," she lied, smiling and taking another bite of her burger. Across from her, Piper was digging into a salad. Her boyfriend Jason had, if that was even humanly possible, more food on his plate than Percy. Well, that was probably because the former had already eaten his weight in beef.

Leo was there too, for once coming out of his hibernation in Bunker Nine. Frank and Hazel were in New York for a visit, along with a couple Romans that had wanted to see the Greek camp, and Jason had decided after the final battle that he wanted to stay at Camp Half Blood for a while. They had all decided to have a picnic by the lake, so that they could sit together instead of by cabin.

If something happened, all seven of them were right there. They could handle it, as a team. She bit into her food again, a bit more savagely than necessary.

"Just checking," Leo said, raising an eyebrow, "But you aren't imagining that hamburger as anyone's face in particular, are you? Specifically mine?"

"No," Annabeth mumbled, "It's just… I have this feeling something's about to go wrong."

"Oh come _on_," Jason moaned, "Not again!"

"Wait!" she protested, "It isn't anything like… all those other times we felt like something was about to go wrong."

"All those other times, it turned out to be way worse than we expected," Leo pointed out.

"Yeah, but it isn't like my spidey sense is tingling or anything. It's more like… something _always_ happens, every summer."

Percy blinked, as if he'd never noticed that before. "It kind of does, yeah."

"What?" asked Frank, confused.

"Well, including the Titan War," Annabeth clarified, wincing slightly. Those memories were still pretty tender.

"Oh."

They sat in silence for a while, everyone concentrating on their food.

"Well!" Leo said abruptly, making everyone flinch. "We're quite the optimists, aren't we?"

"Hey," Percy said, in that carefree way of his. "Whatever happens, we can work it out. It isn't like we'll have to herd the old group together again."

Percy was right. Besides, nothing was going to happen anyway.

"Okay, someone might as well do it," Leo said, sighing exaggeratedly.

"What?" asked Piper, poking at a piece of lettuce with her plastic fork.

"Jinx it. 'Nah, no way, nothing's gonna happen!' It isn't like we haven't all just done that in our heads anyway." Point one for Leo.

"Is that really how it works?" Percy asked. "I always figured you had to _say_ it."

"If the fates have total power over life and death," Annabeth pointed out, "they can probably‒ ah!" She flicked her hand, positive it had just been stung by something.

"What is it?" Percy demanded, trying to peer over her shoulder.

"Nothing, bee sting," she responded, staring at the small welt on her palm. Blood had started to bead in the cut and run down her hand.

"Are you sure? It looks pretty nasty."

"Yeah, it's‒" she stopped again, sucking in a breath as something _jabbed_ her hand. Another tiny cut had emerged, about an inch from the first one.

"What's going on?" Piper asked, concerned.

"Something's _biting _me," Annabeth said indignantly.

"What? Is it a mosquito?" Leo demanded, looking around.

"No," she replied, and then yelped again. Another identical cut had appeared, next to the first two.

"Nothing's here," Hazel said, standing up and walking over.

"Something invisible?" asked Frank.

"It's like something tiny is stabbing me," Annabeth mused, frowning.

"Maybe it's a new kind of monster," Percy said.

"Great. That's comforting," she replied. Again, a sharp pain, forming a little square of red dots on her palm. Shaking her hand violently, trying to fling off whatever kept jabbing her, she stood up. Everyone else followed her lead, crowding around until she asked them to back off a little.

"Should we find Chiron?" asked Jason.

"No, I think it stopped," Annabeth replied.

Then, her hand caught fire.

Well, that's what it _felt_ like. She yelled involuntarily, flailing her arm as a searing pain erupted from her palm.

"Annabeth!" Percy shouted, grabbing her uninjured hand. "What's wrong?!"

Ripping away from his grasp, she stumbled a few steps towards the lake, searching for something that could relieve the sudden agony in her hand. It felt like her blood was boiling!

She could hear people shouting, but all her attention was glued to the pain, and wanting to plunge her hand into the cool water of the lake. Her knees buckled, sending her sprawling onto the grass. Somewhere in some fuzzy corner of her mind, she noticed that she was screaming.

Then, after what felt like hours but was probably minutes, as suddenly as it had started, the pain stopped. Pure relief made her want to laugh, but she was too out of breath.

"Annabeth! Are you okay?" Percy demanded, from where he was kneeling at her side. "The others ran to get help."

"Yeah, it's‒" Once again, she stopped midsentence. Instead of blood, the four little marks on her hand were slowly oozing golden ichor. The blood of the gods‒ it made sense that demigods would have some too. As she watched, fascinated, a single drop trickled down her pinky finger and fell to the ground.

"Weird," Percy muttered, breaking the silence.

"No kidding," she said, rubbing her palm. Ichor smeared all over her fingers, making her feel slightly sick. It had a gross chalky texture, and still felt hot.

Without warning, something in her stomach _twisted,_ and she found herself retching emptily into the grass.

She tried to take a deep breath, but found that the air just wouldn't come. Horrifying wheezing sounds started coming from her throat, and her hand flew to her throat.

"Oh gods," Percy said, starting to panic. "What _now?_" He slapped her hard on the back, trying to dislodge whatever she was choking on‒ but she wasn't choking. Annabeth _knew_ there wasn't anything stuck in her throat; she just _couldn't_ breathe. Poison? Was whatever had pricked her dipped in some kind of monster venom?

Dizzy, she tried to swallow the air, desperate for oxygen. Blackness started gathering at the edges of her vision, and her hand started hurting again. Panic swelled in her chest, making her head swim even more. Percy was shouting something, but she couldn't seem to make out any words. Her eyes slid shut, but she could still hear yelling, feel the burning in her hand and her lungs.

Suddenly, something burned red across the insides of her eyelids. Symbols, strange letters she could make no sense of. The pain went from her hand, and air, sweet clear air rushed into her lungs.

On second thought, the air wasn't very sweet anymore. It smelled musty, like a room with no windows. She opened her eyes, confused, and started to ask Percy what was going on.

Annabeth blinked, her mouth hanging open.

She wasn't by the lake anymore. There were books everywhere, all along every wall. The floor was made of stone, as was the ceiling, and she was sitting on something… rectangular.

There was a pause, as she tried and failed to figure out where she was.

"Er," said a voice from behind her. She leapt to her feet, whirling around and raising her fists. "Who exactly are you?"

"I was going to ask the same thing," she replied, staring at… well, nothing human. He, well, she thought it was a he, had dark green hair and luminous yellow eyes. They looked a bit like cat's eyes, but with round, human pupils. She thought she could take him; he was short and skinny, a bit like Octavian but without any sort of weapon.

"Well, I think I get to ask first, since you invaded my library," he said, holding up… a spoon?

"No, I'm pretty sure kidnapping is worse than breaking and entering."

"I've got a dangerous weapon you know." She blinked, surprised.

"That's a spoon," she pointed out, raising an eyebrow.

"True, but it's a powerful spoon. Imbued with the blood of the gods, whatever the Nether that means." Blood of the gods! Just before she… teleported, or whatever had happened, some ichor had come from her hand.

"Let me get this straight… you used some kind of dark magic to steal my blood and imbue your weapon with strange powers, and you used it on a spoon?!" Then again, she'd heard of monsters that wore chainmail Muumuus.

"That was… sort of an accident," the stranger replied, turning bright red. She opened her mouth to respond, but he interrupted her. "Wait… you're a _god?!_"

"What?! No!" she blurted out.

"But you said I stole _your_ blood!" he protested, raising the spoon as if to strike.

"No, I'm, uh, half god… technically." Well, it was a bit too late to lie about that. Being transported to some strange place with a spoon-toting monster tended to put her off her game a bit.

"Ah, that makes _total_ sense. I bloody _hate _magic! Notch damned book…" he said, looking angrily at something behind her.

Not wanting to turn her back on him, she asked, "What book?"

"That one," he replied, pointing. Curiosity overriding her mistrust of the stranger, she turned around. Ah, so that's what she'd been sitting on. There was a small table in the center of the room, made of some strange black stone, with glowing blue corners. In the middle of the table, hovering over a velvety red cloth, was a book.

It looked about as magical as a book could be, flipping its pages on its own and seemingly at random, as if there was a strong wind in the room. Somehow, it managed to turn pages _smugly_.

"That's the _Book of Mysteries_," the stranger said. "I'm Tyx, by the way."

"Ticks?" she asked, facing him again. "Like a clock?"

"Well, it's spelled T-Y-X, but that works I suppose."

"Okay…" she said, "So why did you bring me here? I don't suppose you just wanted to show me your spoon?"

"I told you, it was an accident!" Tyx protested, lowering his 'deadly weapon'.

"So, what, you _accidentally_ said some mystical incantation and _accidentally_ drew a pentagram, and poof! I'm here? Accidentally?"

"Well, I did the spell on purpose, but I meant to use it on a sword. And, I was looking for sharpness ten, not some random half-god girl."

It took a moment for that to sink in. "You cast some weird blood magic spell, and you_ didn't know what it did?!_"

"Uh, yeah. It isn't like the words of the spell matter anyway," he said, somewhat bitterly.

"You lost me," Annabeth said, completely confused.

"The words on the page are usually pretty much random. Nobody knows what an enchantment is going to be until they use it."

"So you just keep casting spells until something works?! Aren't you worried about, I don't know, blowing up your library?"

He looked genuinely surprised by that. "Spells can't blow things up! They aren't supposed to do anything except give our weapons buffs."

"Yeah, obviously spells can't do anything else! I must not be here then, thank you so much for that!"

Tyx sighed, ruffling his strange-colored hair. "Okay, this was new… and I'm probably never going to see that spell again."

Suddenly, he yelled something about a notch and threw the spoon hard at the wall. Annabeth ducked instinctively, because spoon or no, it had mystical powers. "A SPOON! I USED THE RAREST SPELL KNOWN TO MAN ON A BLOODY SPOON!"

As the utensil collided with the bookcase, the old volumes suddenly burst into flames. Cursing, Tyx rushed over and started beating at the flames with his bare hands.

"Hey! You'll burn yourself!" she protested, but the fire was out and he looked fine.

"Okay," he said, blowing some hair out of his face. "Let's start over. I'm Tyx, so what's your name?"

She wondered for a second whether or not to tell him, but there wasn't much point lying. Presumably, he could've killed her already with that… spoon.

"Annabeth," she said. "So where exactly‒"

"TYX! I am going to kill you this time, I really am!" A woman with hair such a violent shade of bubblegum pink Annabeth's eyes hurt clambered up a wooden ladder against one wall, with murder in her chocolaty-brown eyes.

"K-Kandy!" he stammered, backing away, "I, uh…"

"Who is _that?_" she demanded, glaring at Annabeth. "And what was that noise earlier?!"

"Oh… about that. I accidentally used blood magic to summon a demigod."

A statement like that usually stuns people into silence, and this Candy person was no exception.

"Alright… I need to think a bit before I deal with that sentence. So, why in the name of Notch is that spoon glowing?!"

Tyx turned red again. "It may or may not be enchanted with fire aspect…"

"Tyx!"

"…And sharpness..."

"TYX!"

Leaning backwards, as if the extra distance would protect him, he said, "Ten."

Candy drew a sword at that, pointing it at his face. "You didn't use the books, did you?" she said, sounding surprisingly calm for someone who was an inch away from murder.

"Um, no. B-but, I was trying to use a diamond sword‒"

"What kind of half-wit sorcerer are you?! You _accidentally_ enchanted a _spoon_ with sharpness ten?!"

"And something called blood of the gods," he said helpfully, his eyes glued to the sharp sword-tip at his throat.

Candy sighed and sheathed the sword. "I'm very tempted to feed you to the chickens," she said, as if commenting on the weather.

"Uh," Annabeth interjected, "so you're Candy?"

"No," said the girl, clenching a fist. "My name is Kandy. With a K. _Not_ Candy. Actually, it's KandyKrushh, with two Ks and an extra H, but you can call me Kandy. Just not Candy." Annabeth blinked, confused.

Not sure how to respond, she said simply, "I'm Annabeth."

"Tyx, give her the tour. Unless she's a new kind of monster, then kill her with that stupid spoon of yours," Kandy said, turning around and heading down the ladder.

"Well," Annabeth said after a long moment. "She's… blunt."

"Yeah. That's our leader, Kandy. She once singlehandedly killed four creepers with a raw fish!"

"A raw… What are creepers?" Annabeth asked, deciding she didn't want to know about the fish.

"What are‒ But‒ What?!" Tyx spluttered, gaping at her. "Follow me," he said, heading for the ladder.

Her new acquaintance led her down the wooden ladder, past a room full of what looked like pizza furnaces, and into an empty one that seemed a bit like a lobby.

"Come on," he said, opening a door and stepping out into an alleyway. It was definitely not a street‒ proper streets were wider than three feet. Tyx made a right and began striding confidently along an equally narrow path. Whenever they ran into someone headed in the opposite direction, they had to turn sideways and squeeze past one another. Passing a small plot of farmland, they eventually came to a gigantic wall, with a pen of sheep crowding against the road on their left.

It was tall, nearly the height of New York skyscrapers, with a small staircase clinging to it.

"This way," Tyx said, pointing to the narrow path up the wall.

Suddenly, someone came sprinting headlong out of another passageway, slamming into Tyx and pushing him right over the fence into the sheep paddock.

"Watch it," said the stranger, in a deep voice.

Annabeth had to crane her neck just to look at him. He was six feet, easy, with bulging muscles and shining armor strapped to every inch of exposed skin. Two solid black eyes gleamed from beneath a massive jutting brow, like a Neanderthal, and his face looked like it was chiseled from stone‒ literally. His skin seemed to be made of granite.

Towering over her, he blinked once, and started laughing.

"Looks like you finally snapped! Went and spelled yourself a girlfriend."

Tyx, who had just managed to haul himself out from among the animals, turned bright red and started stammering.

"N-no, I-I…"

Annabeth stepped closer, raising an eyebrow.

"Wanna say that again?" she asked sweetly, making a fist.

"Don't mess with me," the stone man replied, drawing… a blue sword?

"Wouldn't dream of it," she replied, smirking.

"Uh, Grease…" Tyx said, going from tomato red to pale as a sheet in about half a second.

The big guy had had enough of her, apparently. Roaring, he slashed out, nearly cutting her in half. Annabeth danced back, still grinning. In truth, she was terrified and wondering why in Hades she'd goaded him. All she had was a knife that wouldn't work on mortals, although this Grease guy didn't know that.

"Annabeth! Catch!" Tyx yelled, tossing her the spoon.

"A spoon?" laughed Grease, swinging the sword again. She caught the spoon, dodging the blow, which lodged Grease's sword half a foot deep in the stone path.

_Woah_, she thought. Whatever that thing was made of, it could cut through stone. She _so_ shouldn't have picked a fight with this guy…

Sighing, imagining how hard Leo would laugh if he could see her fighting a giant with a _spoon_, she stepped forward.

The sword was stuck; she could just come up to him and‒

Grease gave one tug, and his blade slid free with a menacing rasping noise. Oh Styx…

There wasn't time to step back again, so Annabeth did the only other thing available. She stabbed him with the spoon, right between his breastplate and shoulder pads.

She'd expected him to be hurt. After all, being stuck with a sharpened wooden spoon is always at least _annoying_. Of course, being made of stone would make Grease completely invulnerable, as far as sharpened spoons were concerned. Naturally, she only remembered this a split second before contact.

The spoon connected‒ and went right through his seemingly impenetrable hide like _butter_. He staggered back, and _burst into flame_.

"Ahh!" she yelled, horrified, the now bloody spoon still in her hand.

"AHH!" Grease screamed, waving his arms.

"The farm! Go for the farm!" Tyx shouted above the noise, pointing at the small pool of water among the crops.

Sprinting as fast as he could, the big stone guy who definitely shouldn't be flammable made a beeline for the water, jumping in and curling in a ball, submerging himself completely.

"Somebody get a healing potion!" Tyx yelled at the small group of bystanders.

Annabeth stared uncomprehendingly at the spoon.

"Kandy is gonna kill you," said a tallish guy with a bright red Mohawk. "Nice fighting skills, by the way. Oh, and where in all the Nether did you get that spoon?"

* * *

It took a little over a minute for help to arrive in the form of a little girl. Annabeth thought she looked about six, with a massive golden sword almost as tall as she was strapped to her back and blood red hair bound in a braid down her shoulder. Pushing people out of the way, she jogged up to the burned and bleeding Grease.

He yelped in pain as she shoved a glass vial at him, full of some pink liquid.

"Here. Now stop _whining_," she said, apparently not fazed by his size. "This is the _third time_, Grease. Seriously, we're going to have to arm you with a stick if you keep picking fights."

"Hey, I can't help it," he said, chugging the potion. "I'm just _angry _all the time!"

As he spoke, his burns just… faded. In about a second, third degree burns had become a sunburn, and his stab wound was barely a scratch.

"Woah…" Annabeth blurted, amazed. Even ambrosia couldn't do _that!_

"Right," the girl said, turning on Annabeth. "Now _you_ half killed him, so _you_ are going to get me the ingredients for a new potion."

Tyx gulped, running his hand through his hair again. ""K-Kitty, you d-don't mean g-go t-to the‒"

"Nah, I want her to get some netherwart from that spot on the beach!" she replied sarcastically.

"Er, K-Kitty," he persisted, "She c-c-can't go in the N-Nether alone, it's t-too‒"

"No. On second thought, Grease!" Kitty yelled, turning on the victim of the… spoon. "You're going too. If you kill each other, it's _not_ my problem. I am sick and _tired _of you brawny idiots maiming each other and leaving _me_ to clean up your mess! One bit of netherwart, that's all I need. We've already got melons coming out of our ears, and gold is pretty easy to get."

Annabeth had no idea what netherwart was, but she was pretty sure that gold shouldn't be able to dissolve in a potion, and a melon? That just seemed… odd.

"Um, this Nether place… what's it like, exactly?" she asked, hoping that the look on Tyx's face was coming from her working with Grease.

"Uh, K-kitty? I-I want t-to g-g-go t-too," Tyx said, making an honest effort to look brave but failing rather miserably.

"Whatever. You helped start it, I guess. Bring what you want, but no diamonds. Kandy's orders."

Grease nodded curtly, and then strode off into one of the side alleys. The crowd of people that had come to watch the fight had all dispersed, probably scared off by their healer. Kitty shrugged. "Good luck," she said, then turned and jogged off, back where she came.

Tyx looked ready to keel over; he was pale and shaking slightly. Despite feeling a bit annoyed with how easily the guy was intimidated by someone even smaller than he was, she was glad he was coming along. Grease was _so_ not the person she wanted to trust with her life.

"Okay, seriously," she said, poking the guy in the shoulder. "What's the Nether?"

He stared at her for a full second. "Okay, come on. I want to show you something."

She had no choice but to follow him as he sprinted the last few yards of path and began to climb the stone steps, panting loudly as he did so.

"Hey, Tyx?" she asked. "Not that I'm not glad you're coming… but do you know how to fight?"

"Oh, yeah. I'm just not really built for it… but I can handle myself. Um, usually."

"What do you mean _usually?"_

_"_Well, I don't much like the heat. And I'm allergic to pigs."

"What?!" she demanded, at a complete loss again.

"In the Nether, there are these things. We call them zombie pigmen. They're like pigs, but bipedal zombies. And they have swords," he replied, finally reaching the top of the wall.

"Great, just great," she sighed, coming up next to him.

"Luckily, they leave us alone as long as we don't bother them. Otherwise, they'd pretty much disembowel us." Tyx looked like he wanted to be sick.

"Hey," she said, glancing over at him. "You don't have to go if you don't want to."

"I want to," he insisted. "'Sides, I have _got_ to get out of this stupid fort and away from all these people."

Annabeth blinked. "If you hate them so much, why don't you leave?"

"Well," he replied, rumpling his hair, "It isn't so much that I hate _them_, specifically. I just don't like people in general."

"Any particular reason?" she asked, somewhat offended.

"Yep. I was a hermit for at least ten years, never saw a soul‒ besides people who wanted me to enchant things, that is."

"Oh," she said, feeling a twinge of sympathy. The poor guy had been alone for that long?

"I don't mind so much if there's one or two people that I like. Well, I should be able to tolerate Grease for a few days," he clarified, grinning.

"This'll be a piece of cake," she assured him.

"Kitty's not so bad, you know," he said, studying his spoon carefully.

"No, she just sent us all on a death mission. Not bad at all."

"Yeah, but she's… fed up. She's our healer, so every time a couple of people beat each other up, it's her responsibility to clean up the mess. I guess we're all just… _sick_ of each other."

"So why don't you leave?"

"Oh! I forgot to mention it… see there?" he asked, pointing straight up at where the sky was blushing a bright red.

"Yeah," she said, confused.

"Watch."

Just as she was sure sunlight was about to peek over the horizon, something… happened. The stars jumped into different places, and instead of the sun, the _moon_ begun to rise.

"What the…"

"Someone made some kind of machine that changes the time to night whenever morning arrives," Tyx explained, leaning on the stone parapet.

"Great," she moaned.

"And see that?" Tyx asked, pointing off the wall. Annabeth crossed the top of the wall and looked down at… something green. It was leaf-colored and had a vaguely leafy texture. Actually, there were quite a few of the weird leaf things. In fact, there were monsters everywhere. There were humanoid things with rotten skin and shuffling steps, probably zombies, human skeletons armed with bows and arrows, and… _gigantic spiders_. That was _so_ just her luck. "That's a lot of baddies."

"Yeah," he sighed. "They spawn‒ er, pop into being, I guess, in darkness. In the morning, most of them burn and only the creepers are a threat anymore."

"Which no longer happens."

"Yes. That's a creeper by the way," he said, nodding at the green things.

"It doesn't look that bad," she mused, peering out over the battlements.

"They explode," he said simply.

"Oh. Okay, why not?"

"The world hates us. Not to mention, there's worse things in the Nether. Like… giant monsters called Ghasts that shoot fireballs." Tyx said, getting a bit pale again. "And lots of lava. It's underground, deep underground. Hell, basically."

_Wonderful_, thought Annabeth. _Hell. Again._

"I'm sorry by the way… about bringing you here."

He almost looked like he was about to cry, his creepy yellow eyes all wide and kitten-y. First Percy, now this. Why was it that everyone she met could pull off that innocent… _look_.

"That's okay!" she said hurriedly. "After our suicide mission, you can figure out how to undo the spell."

"Yeah," he mumbled, not sounding very confident.

They stood in silence for a minute, looking up at the stars or down at the army of monsters.

"We'd better get to the barracks," Tyx muttered, and started heading down the stairs. "There's a spare bed in there somewhere. Second row, I think.

"Okay," she said, following him down the stairs and through the narrow paths.

"Well, if we die, we won't have to stay in this dump anymore." Tyx chirped optimistically.

"It isn't _that_ bad," she protested.

"You haven't seen the barracks yet."

* * *

"You have _got_ to be kidding," Annabeth said flatly.

"Nope," Tyx assured her. "That bed there is empty," he added, pointing to a slot in the middle of a massive _heap_ of beds that looked ready to collapse under its own weight.

"How the‒ What the‒ How do you sleep?!" she spluttered.

"With much difficulty. On my back actually; there isn't much room to be sideways."

"There's no way I can sleep in that."

"No, but eventually you'll be tired enough that you just pass out."

"But we've got a dangerous mission tomorrow! And is Grease seriously going to sleep in that top row?"

"Yes," Grease said simply, climbing up the ladder and _squeezing_ into the space between the bed and the ceiling. His face was actually crushed against the stone, with his nose bent sideways. How exactly it bent when it was apparently made of rock too, Annabeth had no idea.

"Hopefully the adrenaline can keep us awake while we fight evil demons. Personally, I like to take naps in my chair in the library when I can't sleep well at night," Tyx said cheerfully.

Annabeth opened her mouth to protest some more, but decided against it. She hadn't really seen anyplace _else_ they could fit a bed. Well, they probably wouldn't let her haul one of the beds out onto the wall.

Giving Tyx a venomous look, even though it wasn't strictly his fault that the sleeping arrangements were so pathetic, she climbed awkwardly into the empty bunk.

With the next bed inches from her face, smelling like sweat and wet wool, she figured it would be a long while before she fell asleep. Annabeth wondered absently what Percy was doing. And just like that, she was obsessing over whether they were okay, whether something else had happened, if they knew where she was. Probably not, but how long would it take to get back? What if time moved faster here, or Tyx couldn't undo the spell? This quest into the Nether was ridiculous; they could be using this time to figure out what exactly had happened. Maybe it was an easy fix, just burn the spoon or something.

Someone, maybe Grease, was snoring like a chainsaw. How was she supposed to stop thinking if she couldn't sleep? Cursing softly, she pulled her pillow out from under her head and tried to smother her ears, but it was no use. She would just have to lie here until morning, unless…

Very carefully, mindful of how unstable the pile of beds probably was and hoping to Athena nothing creaked, Annabeth slid herself off her mattress and into open air. Grabbing the ladder, she slowly turned herself around, easing herself onto the stone floor.

It was surprisingly cold outside, the air biting at her bare arms. Still, it was quiet, peaceful… and didn't smell like Percy's dirty socks. The stars blazed above her, much brighter than she'd ever seen them. They were strange stars though, new constellations, part of another world. Well, she assumed this was another world. The rules here were different; magic was for enhancing weapons, there were potions that could instantly fix someone who'd been on fire, and something else… something more.

Annabeth climbed the stone stairs up to the top of the wall, rubbing her arms. The air had something else to it, a strange smell. Not a smell, exactly. It was more like this world had a feeling floating on the wind, one that just didn't exist back at home. Like the future was full of possibilities, adventure. She was no stranger to excitement; the last few years had given her more than enough, but here it felt like all she needed was her fists and her feet. She could do anything, go anywhere, and anyone that got in the way could go jump in a lake.

Reaching the top of the stairs, Annabeth leaned against the nearest battlement and slid to the ground. Huddled up against the cold, she leaned her head back and closed her eyes.

It was uncomfortable, all hard cold stone. Still, the air was silent as the grave, with the occasional odd noise from the monsters below. Better yet, that exhilarating feeling of power, the strength to overcome any obstacle, still swelled in her chest. Leaning against that frigid wall, Annabeth felt freer than ever before.

* * *

**Well then! :P**

**Stay tuned for moar chapterz! Mwah ha ha! :D**

**Please review as well! It really means a lot to know that people are enjoying the stuff I write, and even telling me about things I got dead wrong is super helpful.**

**Until next time! Cheers!**


	3. If You're Happy and You Know it

**K, I'm back again! :P**

**Shoutout to 1eragon33 for reviewing, and happy (really, really late) birthday! :3 Sorry, I was on vacation in Norway. (:D)**

**Anyways, let's just pretend I'm not totally seeking reviews. :P Seriously though, this is mostly for fun, but I love feedback and refuse to apologize for that!**

**DISCLAIMER: If I made Minecraft and PJO, I could just publish this! Then the poor suckers would have to pay for my writing! WAHAHA!**

* * *

_Clang!_ Jason's gleaming gold sword bounced off Riptide in a shower of sparks, as Percy advanced another step. Sweating and panting, the son of Jupiter raised his blade to deflect yet another furious swipe. Percy's sneakers pounding on the hard, dry ground of the training arena, he slashed again and again, channeling all his rage and pain into the sword, feeling himself calming down. Training was good, simple, it made sense.

His girlfriend disappearing into thin air right in front of him? Not so much.

Percy could almost feel his blood heating up as he thought about it. He'd been so happy, ready for anything… and bam! Nothing he could do, no way to stop whatever it was, just standing there like a useless lump.

_Thud!_ Jason sidestepped a particularly violent attack, letting him bury his sword in the dirt. He flew forward, but Percy yanked his blade out of the ground and stepped back.

The son of Jupiter feinted towards his head, then twirled his weapon around and slashed at Percy's sword arm.

He jerked backwards, but too slowly.

"Wait!" he panted, dropping Riptide. His hand was oozing blood.

"Sorry!" Jason managed, in between huge gasps of air. "Didn't mean to cut you."

"That's alright," he replied, shaking his arm and flinging a tiny drop of blood into the air.

Somehow, the sharp pain of the cut seemed to sharpen his senses, calm his hyperactive brain. Maybe it gave him something else to focus on.

Still, his mind kept wandering right back to Annabeth. Grunting in frustration, he lunged forward, swinging faster, harder, ignoring the burning in his muscles.

Jason beat Riptide out of the way, then thrust forward at Percy's chest.

She was gone, just like that. No warning, no prophesy… just that weird sting. He connected with Jason's sword and slid it out of the way, twisting his friend's wrist around, went for his chest.

A streak of gold knocked his attack aside and sped towards his cheek. As he moved to block the attack, the edge changed direction and headed towards the other side of his face. Again, Jason sent the metallic blur careening in the opposite direction, neatly dodging Percy's parries.

No bright flash, loud explosion, not even a slow fade. One second, she was there. Then, poof! Not even a poof… no noise at all.

The stinging in his hand doubled, and something in his chest burst. He turned Riptide sideways and slashed as hard as he could at Jason's sword, knocking it back towards the guy's face. He stumbled back and dropped it, mostly to avoid getting beheaded by his own weapon, then tripped and went sprawling in the dirt.

Panting hard, Percy capped Riptide and offered a hand. Jason took it, rubbing the back of his head where he'd collided with the ground.

"You know, it's just sparring. There isn't a rule that says you have to kill me," he said, picking up his sword.

"Sorry," Percy muttered sheepishly.

"Maybe you could take your rage out on the dummies instead," he suggested.

It wasn't such a bad idea. They had far too much of their straw-guts still inside their bodies.

"Hey man," Jason said, sounding worried. "You should get your hand looked at."

The guy's hand was covered in blood where Percy had helped him up.

"Oh," he said, his voice a little higher in pitch than it should've been. "Hey, Jason?"

"Yeah?"

"Get Chiron," Percy said, as he noticed just how familiar the cuts on his hand looked. There was no way Jason had done that, not while he was holding Riptide. An odd L shaped incision, with a dot hovering between each end, like a connect-the-dot square that hadn't been finished.

He knew what was probably going to happen. He'd seen it, stood there helplessly while Annabeth screamed. Just thinking about it made him feel sick inside, small and weak and _useless_.

All he wanted was to stick whatever had done this with the business end of Riptide… and if the strange cut was going to teleport him somewhere, it made sense that it would send him to the same place. Maybe, he'd be able to find the monster that had started this new… whatever this was. Magic?

Suddenly, the mark on his hand was filled with sharp agony, making him close it into a fist, hoping in vain that it would stop. He dropped to the ground, no longer capable of standing upright, and curled up around his hand. Some part of him thought that maybe he could cut it off… but that was a really, _really_ bad idea, no matter how much better it would feel.

Jason was sprinting towards the big house, and the last thing Percy really registered was the concerned faces of some Ares campers that had been training on the other end of the arena.

Someone was screaming, and Percy thought vaguely that the cry sounded almost like his voice. But that couldn't be it, because he couldn't breathe anymore. The air just wouldn't come, and as he started to black out he thought he could see stars‒ but that didn't make any sense, because it had just been daytime. Still, there was the night sky, spread out above him, and covered in strange letters, written in fire across the constellations.

Maybe if he could read the words, they could tell him how to make it stop.

* * *

Silence. Stillness. The pain was gone. Percy lay sprawled on the ground, eyes closed, just enjoying the quiet, the peace. The lack of searing pain was pretty nice too.

The last thing Percy wanted was to get up. Unfortunately, there was something digging into the small of his back, and some idiot ‒ probably Leo ‒ had set up a giant humidifier or something. The air was more like breathing in the lake than anything else, all steam, and even though he could breathe underwater, there was something buzzing in the back of his mind, panicking. It was like the world around him was half air and half water, and his lungs couldn't figure out which he was supposed to be breathing.

Not only that, it smelled like brimstone, sulfur, and…

Bacon?!

The smell was so _incredibly_ out of place that his eyes snapped open and he sat bolt upright, glancing around and half-expecting to see a plateful of eggs, sausages, and Canadian bacon.

'Course, going by the smell the eggs were rotten and the sausages had been left in the sun for a few decades, but he was _hungry_.

There wasn't any breakfast.

Two-legged, rotten, sword-wielding _pigs_ were strolling around like they owned the place. Their faces looked like they were melting, the flesh sloughing off their skulls and dripping down onto the floor… and they smelled like bacon.

Percy was suddenly half-way between wanting to throw up at their sight and smell ‒ the sour, not-so-pleasant part that probably came from being all rotten ‒ and fighting to suppress this little corner of his mind that still sort of wanted to eat them.

He was _never_ eating bacon again.

Still, at least they hadn't noticed him yet. Whether or not they were basically walking ham sandwiches, those swords looked pretty sharp. Imperial gold, or at least something very similar.

Then, there was everything else. He was in some kind of cave, made of a strange maroon-colored rock that was probably responsible for the sulfur and brimstone smells. Some of it was on fire, but it didn't seem to be spreading, so Percy decided not to panic yet. The pig things were wandering aimlessly around the mouth of the cave, and he could see where it opened up into a _massive_ cavern, so huge that he couldn't make out any kind of wall on the other side.

In short, it looked _way_ too much like Tartarus, if someone had set up a pigsty down there for whatever reason.

Not knowing what else to do, he stood up and pulled Riptide out of his pocket. This was going to be _so_ much fun.

* * *

Mozart. That was Annabeth's first thought as she opened her eyes. Something was playing piano in the distance. Actually, it sounded a bit like Beethoven's third… was she hearing things?

"That's the alarm. Time to get up," said an unfamiliar voice. Annabeth shot to her feet, raising her fists, her heart lodging somewhere in her throat. She'd just _napped_ on a wall, right above a horde of monsters! What if those giant spiders could climb? _Stupid, stupid, stupid_, she chanted to herself. Looking around wildly, she still couldn't see whatever had been talking. Where had it come from?!

Then, she noticed that there was a leather jacket on the floor. She must've shaken it off when she got up, but why would a monster…

"I come in peace," the voice said, sounding amused. "I swear!"

Up. It came from above her! Glancing up, she saw a tall, wiry guy sitting casually on the parapet, with bubblegum pink hair… a dark green Mohawk…

Something in her brain, probably the part that processed color, shorted out.

Butter yellow, sky blue, neon orange, mud brown, lavender… it was like a box of Crayola crayons had been strapped to a stick of dynamite and dropped into an active volcano. And his _eyes!_ One was a deep red, like dried blood ‒ she would know ‒ and the other was a beautiful indigo, like the night sky over Camp Half-Blood. They were pointed in opposite directions, hazy and unfocused. He should be basically blind. Not only that, he was grinning at her in a way that was somehow both endearing _and_ unsettling.

"Sorry, can't really help it. I have the fashion sense of a deranged peacock." A deranged, _colorblind_ peacock, actually, but he seemed harmless enough.

"Uh, hi," Annabeth managed, lamely. There was something really off-putting about how he seemed to be staring at her, when each of his eyes was actually looking everywhere _but_ her.

"I'm happy!" Did this guy have some kind of superpower that made everyone he talked to completely forget how to form thoughts?!

"Good for you," she replied, after a minute of processing the completely random statement.

"No, no!" he laughed, showing off pearly white teeth that only served to highlight just how clash-y and unpleasant the rest of his color scheme was. "That's my name. Happy." Ah. Well, why not?!

"O-okay," she found herself saying, more or less on automatic. The leather jacket was still crumpled up on the floor. Partly to distract herself from the tortured rainbow named Happy, she reached down and picked it up. It was soft, but surprisingly thick and heavy.

"You looked cold," he explained, pointing at the coat.

"Thanks!" Annabeth replied, sincerely.

"It's a leather chestplate. I'm supposed to wear one whenever I'm on my rounds… but let's face it. If this wall goes down, we're all dead, and a scrap of cow skin isn't gonna make much of a difference."

"Well, you should take it. I'm probably going to get some armor, for my mission. Right?" She tossed him the jacket, and he caught it without missing a beat, which he definitely shouldn't be able to do with his eyes like that. There was no way he'd be able to focus, right?

"Sure. Armory's over there," Happy replied, gesturing vaguely towards the far end of the castle.

"Uh, alright," Annabeth said. "Thanks."

Very aware that he was still looking at her, she made her way carefully towards the stone stairs carved into the wall.

Climbing down, she wondered whether his eyes were actually at that angle, or if that was just some kind of illusion. Grease hadn't seemed to be made out of stone, not really. He'd been stabbed with the spoon, and his nose had bent in a very un-stonelike fashion the night before.

Yawning, she slowly made her way through the winding paths that connected the haphazard collection of buildings that formed the inside of this fortress, or whatever it was. Somewhere, there was an armory where she could get some gear, though she doubted very much whether she could actually walk in the heavy iron plate Grease had been sporting earlier, let alone fight. Maybe they'd let her go in with just a sword.

For some reason, Annabeth found herself missing her bone sword. Maybe it could hurt the creatures in this world, since she'd never heard anyone actually say that it was like celestial bronze or imperial gold.

Then again, maybe her dagger would work on them too. It wasn't as if they were mortals. She was pretty sure that mortals never spontaneously exploded like those creeper things.

Finally, after a lot of fruitless wandering around, she ran into a burly guy with actual _tiger fur_ who pointed towards a squat building with a chicken coop built on top of it, for whatever reason.

As armories went, it wasn't particularly impressive. The tool shed at Camp Half-Blood had a better variety. All she could see were swords of various materials, some axes, and bows. Archery wasn't exactly her forte, and the battleaxes looked more like hatchets than anything else, so she grabbed a basic, sharp-looking sword.

"Iron, no enchants, new, good choice," said a deep, gravelly voice from behind her.

"Grease!" she yelped, surprised.

"Yeah," he agreed, pulling a rusty axe from a small wooden box that definitely shouldn't be able to fit anything bigger than some daggers. Intrigued, she stepped closer and peered inside, and found…

"Uh, why are these weapons so tiny?!"

Grease laughed, tossing the axe back into the box. As she watched, it shrank to the size of a toothpick and landed neatly on top of a pair of wooden practice swords.

"That's what they do when you store 'em."

She was pretty sure that nothing she'd ever tried to fit in a backpack had _ever_ done that.

"Are those containers magic or something?" she asked, pulling out a sword and leaning back as it expanded to full size.

"Nope. It's just what they do."

"How much can you fit in there?" Annabeth found herself asking. She really couldn't help it; it was just so… odd.

"Uh," Grease scrunched up his caveman forehead as if deep in thought. Mumbling some numbers under his breath, as if counting, he finally said, "About two-hundred and forty cubic meters."

"That's… really specific," she managed. The Neanderthal forehead was misleading; he could obviously do pretty quick mental math.

"Yes."

The strong, silent type. Why was everyone who lived in this fortress so _weird?!_ First, Tyx the scrawny wizard, who was so petrified of people he stuttered when talking to a six-year-old a head shorter than him. Grease, the stone-age mathematician with skin made out of stone that was still somehow bendy. Candy, who went around killing leaf-monsters with herring, Kitty the surprisingly aggressive kindergartener who could heal life threatening wounds in seconds. And Happy, the… the… Happy.

"Hey!" Tyx's voice chirped from behind her.

"Hi," she replied, grateful for his presence. Somehow, he was actually the most ordinary person she'd met since he'd _accidentally_ kidnapped her.

Grease just grunted.

Then, he came into her line of sight.

She couldn't help it, she burst out laughing. He was wearing what looked like the same size of armor Grease might use… and Grease was at _least_ a foot and a half taller. The enormous shining helmet was threatening to slip down over his _chin_, with a fully tightened strap hanging down like some kind of demented necklace. A burnished breastplate was actually forcing his arms out like chicken wings, and the leggings were longer than his legs! To move around, he had to swing himself sideways, waddling like an enormous metal marshmallow with legs.

"Smaller size?" he asked, bucking his head back so that they could see his smirk under the helmet. He'd probably done it on purpose, as a morale booster or something, but it was hard not to grin at how ridiculous he looked.

"Maybe you could fit into Kitty's armor," Grease rumbled. It was hard to tell, but she thought he might be trying not to smile.

Tyx made a face, evidenced by the weird shape his barely-visible mouth was making, and started wiggling his arms. For a moment, she thought he was just messing around, but then he finally succeeded in tipping himself over, so that the helmet and legs just slid off him like water. Grease held the huge breastplate while he slipped out of it.

"Alright," Tyx said, clapping his hands together. "I'm gonna go find some armor that fits. Leather, maybe."

He sauntered off, acting _almost_ cocky.

"So," Annabeth said awkwardly, after a minute's pause. "Grease, is your skin really made out of rock?" It was going to bother her unless she figured it out, she just knew it.

"Yes. And no."

There was another painful silence, as she tried very hard not to start banging her head against a wall.

"What?"

"It is stone. But it behaves like skin, can catch fire," he explained.

"Oh."

Yet again, the conversation lulled and Annabeth felt herself fidgeting with the end of her new sword, which was definitely _not_ safe. Grease wasn't exactly talkative.

Finally, Tyx made his way back,

"I didn't see you leave the barracks this morning," he said, a bit too casually.

"Yeah… I crashed on the wall. And then… I… uh…" Somehow, just the _idea_ of describing her conversation with Happy gave her a headache.

"You met Happy?" asked Tyx, sniggering.

"How did you‒"

"There's only one person in this fortress that can make someone look _that_ confused."

"How does he… where'd he _get _those clothes?!"

Tyx burst out laughing. "The Nether."

Even Grease couldn't resist chuckling a little.

"Alright, I've gotta clear all our gear with Kandy. This is what we're bringing, right?" Tyx began drifting towards the door, clearly anxious to get started on their mission.

"You gonna take armor?" asked Grease. Annabeth jumped; he'd been standing right behind her, and with his extra height it almost sounded like he was speaking from somewhere above her head.

"No, I don't think I could maneuver in that," she said, eying the thick leather now strapped to Tyx's skinny frame. "Too thick. And you said it was hot where we're going."

Grease said nothing, just walked away. He stopped halfway to the door, and nodded ascent.

"Okay, so one set of iron, one of leather, an iron axe and a sword. And a spoon," Tyx rattled off, wincing a little at the mention of his little mistake.

"Yeah."

"Sweet," he continued, "Meet me in an hour at… uh… it's the third building to the left of the barracks. Real small. Iron door."

"Okay," Annabeth said, and, like magic, he disappeared. Somewhat disgruntled, she strolled out the door and decided to wander around until it was time for their mission.

And she thought she was done with fire and brimstone.

_Tartarus, here I come. Again._

* * *

**Sorry about the lateness! Now that I'm back in the states, I'm going back to my normal writing schedule, which is still a tad slow, but I'll update as often as I can.**

**Bai! ~(^0^)~**


	4. The Floor is Lava

**:3 Hi! Um… This was actually typed in the fanfiction "Create Document" box. My computer is completely out of memory, so I literally ****_can't_**** save a word document without deleting like a megabyte of data. (Anything less gets instantly filled up.) Anyone know how to fix that? D:**

***CoughGETANEWONEMORONCough* I mean besides that...**

* * *

Something so evil shouldn't look pretty. That was the first thing that popped into Tyx's head when he looked at it. He, Annabeth, and Grease were all standing in the small, unassuming room at the end of a long tunnel that was nicknamed the "Highway to Hell," but no one actually knew what the joke meant or why it was funny. Still, no matter how tiny the space or how confusing and disconnected the humor... it was _impressive. _The smooth blue-black sheen of the obsidian, the deep liquid swirl of the portal, the little purple snowflakes drifting through the stuffy underground air… it looked amazing. Of course, he'd seen one before… but there was something about that eerie noise it made that you just couldn't quite remember properly afterward.

Well, it wasn't exactly sunshine and roses, but Tyx preferred the dark and dank anyway.

Still, there was something that was bothering him, more than anything else. For some reason, he wasn't scared.

Granted, he was two meters away from the entrance to hell ‒ literally ‒ but at least he could get some space. The air might not smell like pig feces and methane... well, okay, maybe it would, but he could snag some mushrooms.

Mushroom stew tasted _so_ much better than carrot and potato, and if he gathered enough he could probably bribe Rye, their chef, to fix him some.

Then, he thought about all the ghasts, and pigmen, and blazes…

Oh, now he was scared.

"Ready?" asked Annabeth.

"No," he replied, and stepped through the gate.

There was a moment, a heartbeat, where all he saw was the infinite spiral of purple, stretching on and on, filling his vision. He was floating, weightless, bodiless…

And then the air was so hot he had to fight down the impulse to rip off his armor, and smelled faintly of burning pork. He would know ‒ he'd set some piggies on fire in his day. It wasn't personal or anything; he just needed the cooked meat.

"Woah," Annabeth choked out, gasping for air. Tyx himself was taking slow, deliberate breaths, trying hard to ignore the humidity. He was actually surprised that, with this much water in the air, the lava hadn't all turned to obsidian. Really, being on fire in this weather just seemed _wrong_.

Then, he took a step out of the portal. If Grease hadn't grabbed him around the middle, he would've died; they were camped on a tiny obsidian platform, high above a massive sea of bubbling magma.

"Oh…" Annabeth said, rather faintly.

"It's fine," Tyx squeaked, wishing his voice was as deep as Grease's. "We'll just... build a bridge.

"Uh, what?"

Right, she was from another universe. Did the word _bridge_ have some other meaning there? Grinning impishly, he lifted his inventory pouch from where it hung on a leather thong around his neck, zipping it open.

"What is that?"

Tyx _almost_ dropped the stack of cobblestone he'd just pulled from his pouch.

"What do you mean, what is that?!" Grease stared at her with his mouth open, for once looking flabbergasted just like a normal person.

"I meant, what is that?" she replied, rolling her eyes. "Different universe, remember?"

"You don't have an inventory?!" he half-shrieked, half-whispered. It was a strange kind of noise, like he was trying to be quiet but his voice cracked and came out a couple octaves too high.

"No."

That was just ridiculous. _Everyone_ had an inventory! _Mobs_ did, or at least zombies and skeletons, and they weren't even people!

"How do you carry building blocks?" he asked, trying not to stare. It was just so strange. The idea of only carrying what he could hold in his hands was insane, and because of the actual size of a block, pretty much impossible.

"I, uh, don't. Building blocks?" she asked, raising an eyebrow.

"These," Grease grunted, flicking a stack of what looked like dirt out of his own pouch (Hooked neatly onto his belt, which was cinched around his waist on the outside of his armor) and carefully leaned over the edge into the bottomless abyss. Well, it wasn't strictly _bottomless_. There was a bottom, a bottom that was bright orange and made bone-chilling bubbling noises.

"What are you doing?" Annabeth demanded, reaching out awkwardly as if to grab his armor in case he might fall, taking in his sheer size and density, and thinking better of it.

"Getting us out of here. A ghast might show up any‒"

"Ree‒EET!" Tyx froze, willing it to go away, go away, don't notice us _please don't kill us!_

_Hushhh!_ A huge flaming black orb sailed out of the gloom, right at their tiny little platform that had absolutely no room whatsoever to dodge. Oh, right, and because one of them (probably him) had apparently offended Notch somehow, getting hit would mean getting knocked into open air and plunging to one's death.

"We're going to _die_," he pointed out, and slashed at the incoming attack with the spoon.

A spoon, and it deflected the fireball perfectly. Well, it hit some mountain somewhere instead of the evil squid-monster it belonged to, but it hadn't melted off their flesh, and that was something.

"Oh gods!" Annabeth yelped, staring at the ghast. The angry orange eyes, like the inside of a furnace, the vast expanse of snow-white skin, the weird little tentacles… it wasn't exactly pretty.

"See, this is why I _hate_ this place!" he explained. "Grease, hurry _up!_"

"What is he doing?" she asked, staring at him. He had frozen, arm hanging off the small extension he'd already made.

"Uh…" he said.

"What?"

"I tried to get out my sword… and I dropped all my dirt." Seriously?!

"Wait, what? Never mind!" Annabeth made a magnificent arc with her sword, sending the next fireball sailing off into the distance.

"I'll build. Does anyone have a bow?" Tyx asked.

"Nope," replied the other two, in perfect unison.

"We went to the Nether and no one brought a bow?!" Cursing, he edged over the precipice, trying very hard not to notice the bright fiery glow coming from beneath him. Whipping out his cobblestone, he separated one block and stuck it to the side of their platform, grumbling about how it made _no sense_ for the portal to end up over here, and why were they the first ones to test it anyway?

Of course, he didn't think once about running back into the overworld with his tail between his legs. Kitty had told him that she would nail him to the outside of the wall and let spiders eat his innards, and he never could quite tell if she was joking or not.

"How does that even‒" Annabeth paused to swipe at another projectile, "work?"

"It just does. Don't question physics, or you'll end up crawling through the forest babbling to yourself for the rest of your life."

"There is no _way_ we can just build a bridge over to shore. That doesn't work! The whole thing will collapse under its own weight."

"You do realize that this entire thing is _floating_, right?!" Tyx squeaked. He hadn't meant to squeak, but the stress was starting to get to him. One lucky shot…

_Boom!_ What?! That pasty little marshmallow hadn't even been aiming at them! It had… shot the portal. Oh, that was just _wonderful_.

"Since when do ghasts have _brains?!_" he demanded.

"You had to put _yours_ somewhere," Grease replied, his voice completely level because of course he wasn't being _insulting_ or anything.

"Hey!"

"You gave sharpness ten to a spoon," Grease pointed out.

Tyx had to resist the urge to hide the offending object behind his back.

They were about halfway to the other side when the ghast made a mistake. It flew too low, and Annabeth pulled something out of her sleeve and tossed it at the monster.

A sword? She threw a sword? When did she even _get _that? Why _throw _it? In the odd half-light of the Nether, it looked almost like some sort of cross between wood and gold. Twirling end over end, it cut through the air like an efficiency pick through netherrack, and…

Went straight through the ghast. He could swear the little, or huge, monster looked almost surprised, like its lunch usually didn't throw things at it.

"Styx," Annabeth muttered. "I liked that knife." Sticks? Huh?

"How did it just go through like that?!" he demanded, placing some more blocks.

"Don't question physics," she replied, smirking.

"And what's a knife?"

"What's a… What?!"

"Mra‒AHH!" moaned the ghast. Twice. At the… same time.

"There's two of them!" he wailed, in his best 'Why me?!' voice.

"Hurry up," Grease grunted. Grease _never_ shouted, or mumbled, or squeaked. He had only two gears: grunt, and grunt quietly. Then, the two ghasts fired almost simultaneously, causing Tyx to make the least dignified sound of his life.

"Jump," said Grease, with his usual solid stoicism.

"What?! That's at least twenty feet down," Annabeth protested.

"Don't question PHYSI-I-I-I-I-I-ICS!" he shouted at the top of his lungs, taking a flying leap off the bridge and plummeting towards the ground.

* * *

For the third time in as many minutes, Percy jumped nearly a foot in the air, uncapping Riptide and pointing it at the pig's face.

Somehow, even though it had been nearly an hour and they'd made no move to attack him, they still scared him every time he saw one out of the corner of his eye. It was definitely pretty creepy, how they always shuffled around for no apparent reason, keeping him in sight, but never _did_ anything.

His feet ached, party from walking and partly because the strange rock that made up most of what he was walking on was _hot_. It burned him even through the thick soles of his sneakers. Then, there was the mud. Well, he _thought_ it was mud. It was a really nasty yellow-brown color, and the weird twisted faces that floated on the top weren't even the worst part. It sucked at his legs, making him sink at least an inch into the evil-smelling muck and wouldn't let go without a fight. Despite all that, he'd have _loved_ the stuff if it were actually as icy cold as it looked. It wasn't. He did what he could to avoid it, but often it was either slog through or fall into a pit of lava. What a choice.

Suddenly, the ground disappeared right in front of him. Percy tipped forward, landing painfully on his left arm.

"Ah!" he gasped, more from surprise than anything else.

"Who's there?!" demanded a harsh whisper.

Percy froze, gripping Riptide so hard his knuckles went white.

"I can _hear _you."

What was he going to do? Well, whoever it was obviously knew he was there, so he decided to hope it didn't want to eat him.

"You can come out, I won't hurt you."

"Boo!" someone shouted, as a head burst right out of the ground, only a few feet away from him. Percy had to bite down on his lip to keep from yelling, especially when he got a good look at it.

He looked a bit like cartoon Satan, with dark red skin, a pointed tail, and little horns. Innocent, almost cow-ish brown eyes peered up at him from his hiding place under the mud, not going with the rest of him at all. To top it off, there was a small, shiny black goatee plastered across his chin.

Still, Percy barely glanced at all that. He was too busy staring at the extremely sharp imperial gold sword he was holding.

"You have a sword! What is that even made of?!" he demanded, in a weirdly high-pitched voice.

"Uh, yeah. It's made of…" he paused, not sure if he should give away the nature of his weapon. Then again, if the… whatever it was were a monster, he would know exactly what Riptide was. "…bronze. Celestial bronze."

"Bronze? What's that?"

"What? It's… a metal…" Percy trailed off. He actually didn't know much else about Celestial bronze, or bronze in general.

"Okay. Hey, are you an overlander?" The creature's eyes narrowed suspiciously.

"A… what?"

"Oh! Good! Follow me," he said, smiling in a very un-devilish way and trotting off. Percy couldn't help noticing that he had goat hooves, just like Grover.

"So," Percy said, pocketing Riptide as he jogged to catch up. "What's your name?"

"Oh, I'm Emma," _she_ replied, beaming. Oops... In his defense, it was really hard to tell. And, she had a goatee.

"Okay… how old are you?"

"I'm six!" Emma declared proudly, holding up one hand, six black-clawed fingers spread out for all to see.

"Oh. That's nice."

They continued on, with Percy sometimes stopping to rest his now blistered feet. He soon found himself fantasizing about a cool, refreshing can of coke, or maybe some lemonade… actually, he wouldn't turn down a hot tin can full of tomato juice. The hot, humid air seemed to suck up water like a sponge, and he was sweating so much he probably looked like he'd been on the business end of a hose recently.

"Do you have any water?" he pleaded, glancing over at Emma.

"_Water?_ Are you a new-spawn or something?"

"A what?" he asked, baffled.

"Obviously, yes. A new-spawn is someone who just, I don't know, started to exist here. Dee explains it better. I spawned _six_ years ago!" She beamed, catching his eye to make sure he noticed how old and mature she was.

"Uh, yeah. That sounds about right," Percy lied. Well, it wasn't exactly a _lie_. He hadn't been here long, only a few hours. Technically, he hadn't existed _here_ before the… whatever it was. Making a conscious effort not to glance at his palm, he shoved his hands in his pockets.

"Come on! Home is through here," she told him, ducking into a tiny opening in one wall, so small and with insides so exactly like everything else he almost couldn't see it.

"Okay…" Percy replied, squeezing into the narrow doorway. "So Emma… are you the only one here?"

Just as the hallway widened into an enormous cave, he felt strong, rough hands lift him clear off the floor, his shoes dangling uselessly.

"No."

* * *

"Don't question PHYSI-I-I-I-I-I-ICS!" shouted Tyx, and dove off the end of the bridge. For a horrified second, Annabeth was sure he was going to land in the lava, but his jump carried him several feet from the edge. He was still standing, which was probably impossible. Human legs couldn't take that high a fall without bending, and there he was, stiff-kneed and fine. This whole parallel universe thing was a bit unfair.

"Come on!" he yelled, backing away from the edge and under a small overhang a few yards away from where he landed.

Stopping to bat away another fireball, Grease backed up to the empty shell that was supposed to be their way home.

"Follow," he said, and launched himself into empty space.

Of the two of them, Annabeth had definitely expected Grease to be less graceful ‒ after all, he was made of stone. Somehow, he managed to execute a perfect swan-dive and rolled to safety, getting up and sprinting over to Tyx.

"Come on!" Tyx yelled, beckoning frantically. Wait, she had to…

Oh.

As far as she could tell, physics were very different here. There was no way she could land on locked knees and not break anything, and if she dropped that far there was a good chance she wouldn't be able to make it under the overhang. _Their_ physics said she'd be fine. She wasn't quite sure she trusted _their_ physics.

Another fireball exploded against the walkway, not six feet away from her, setting fire to the _stone_. Then again, if she landed right…

Annabeth backed up as far as she could, praying silently to every single god on Olympus and quite a few that weren't. Then, she began to pelt towards the end of the bridge as fast as she could. Bending her knees, just tipping her toes off the edge so that she could push forward as well as up… it would've been a great jump.

Just as her feet left the stone, a noise like… well, she'd heard enough fireballs detonate to know what it sounded like. Something hot slammed into her legs, and somehow the spot she was trying to land in became the ceiling, and something hard cracked as her back slammed into it.

It wasn't the first time she'd had the breath knocked out of her, but it was just as terrifying as the last time ‒ probably more so, because the stupid ghost thing was still there. She could see it from where she lay, spread-eagle on jagged maroon rock, its empty eyes locked on her. A deep, fire-rimmed mouth yawned wide, heating up, ready to finish her off…

"What are you doing?!" shouted Tyx. Annabeth couldn't see him from where she was, struggling to take a breath, her legs screaming in pain. "Get up!"

Easier said than done. She tried to move her arms, legs, anything, but they just laid there like limp spaghetti.

"Sorry," grunted a gruff voice. Then, she was up in the air, moving fast, being jostled around… but not right below a fire-breathing monster, which was an improvement.

Under the overhang, Grease swung her down from his broad shoulder and set her down much less gently than she would have liked on stone that smelled like sulfur and methane.

Her breath was finally coming back in short gasps, and the feeling was slowly returning to her hands and feet ‒ which began to hurt. A lot.

"Ungh…" she groaned.

"What happened?! Are you okay?" Tyx looked on the verge of panicking.

"Yeah," she managed, trying not to be sick.

"That wasn't so big a fall," Grease frowned, giving her an odd look.

"Maybe not for you, but in my world, you don't just fall two stories and get up."

"Oh," Tyx chirped. "_Physics_ are different for you. Makes _total_ sense."

"Don't question physics," she grinned, sitting up painfully.

"Can you walk okay?"

"Gimme a minute." Painfully, Annabeth managed to haul herself to her feet, wincing and reaching behind her to massage her bruised back. Her legs really stung, they must have been burned a little in the blast. Upon further inspection, they did look pretty red. Well, there wasn't any cold water around, and she had no idea how else she was supposed to treat a burn without any kind of medical equipment, so it'd have to heal on its own.

"So," she said, once she no longer felt like throwing up, "Where exactly are we going?"

"No idea!" Tyx exclaimed. "We want to follow the X axis, so… that way." He pointed in a seemingly random direction.

"The… what axis?" she asked, confused. As far as she knew, the world couldn't have an X and Y axis. Since the earth was a sphere, not a circle, two-dimensional geometry on its surface was non-Euclidian; you had to use latitude and longitude.

"The X axis. It goes, umm… East to West."

"You can't _have_ a straight X axis unless the world is flat!" she protested, once again at a complete loss.

"The world _is_ flat," Tyx said, in the tones of someone whose little sister had said… well, had said that the earth was flat.

"Your world is flat?!"

"Your world is a _triangle?!_"

"What?" Annabeth blurted. Why would anyone go from flat to triangle?! Triangles _were_ flat!

"Oh. It's… a giant… OH! An O!"

"This isn't a guessing game Tyx. It's a sphere."

"What? Really? Well, anyway, we still have to go that way." Tyx replied, grinning as if the last minute of arguing over whether or not the world was _flat_ had just come up, with both parties somehow being _right_. This universe had very different logic.

"Why?" she asked.

"Nether fortresses tend to form on the Z axis," Grease said, beginning to take his long, clunking strides in the direction Annabeth assumed was East.

"The _Z_ axis?" Wasn't that up and down?

"Oh, and I suppose in your world Z is _vertical_ or something," Tyx rolled his eyes, grinning at the obvious stupidity of such a system.

"It is, actually."

"Ah. Whatever, don't question physics." It wasn't technically a _physics_ difference, but bickering over which letter meant what seemed pretty pointless anyway.

"Come on," Grease motioned towards the entrance to their tiny cave, apparently unfazed by the gigantic blimp monster that was probably still out there.

"What about the ghast?"

"Nothing to be done. We'll just have to make a break for it," Tyx said, not looking very happy with this prospect.

"We can't just go through here?" Annabeth asked, gesturing at the back of the cave ‒ which continued on a lot further than she'd thought. She could see where it opened up into another cavern.

"Oh," Tyx said, grinning like an idiot. Well, not that he'd exactly been Einstein before. "I guess we can."

"Let's go," Grease mumbled, his usual stoic self.

As soon as the tunnel began to widen, Annabeth suddenly found herself face to face with a very dead, very bipedal, very dangerous-looking _pig_.

"Ah!" she gasped reflexively, her hand flying to the hilt of her sword.

"No!" Tyx shouted, his voice echoing in the enclosed space as he forcibly placed himself between her and the creature. Remembering what he'd said before about peaceful nether-dwelling monsters that could "pretty much disembowel" them, she froze in place and slowly, deliberately raised her empty hands.

"You don't have to do that," Grease grumbled, brushing roughly past another pig without a second glance. Whatever they were, they didn't seem to care one way or another whether any of the humans existed or not, which was a bit disconcerting. Still, being ignored was a lot better than being eaten.

The three of them continued on, Annabeth still shuffling slightly, wincing at the burns on her legs. They weren't _bad_, more like the burn you get when you're six and you _really_ want a marshmallow and accidentally touch the charred end of a stick that's been in the fire.

Not that _she'd_ ever done that.

The ghoul ‒ ghast, whatever ‒ was still making those eerie chirping, whining noises, so it had to be out there somewhere. Hopefully it couldn't see them past the huge array of cliffs between them, or maybe it would just leave them alone if they left its territory.

Yeah, as if.

"Right," Tyx began, after a minute or two of walking. "Anyone have a flint and steel?" he looked grim for some reason.

"Why? The last thing we want is _more_ fire, isn't it?" Annabeth said, non-plussed.

"For the portal," Grease explained. The portal, which had been blasted and was now a lot less operational.

"Would matches work?" she asked, pulling a book out of her pocket. She and Percy had been planning on going camping, and they hadn't wanted to bring Leo. The thought made her stomach twist a little... she missed him. If nothing else, she wished she wasn't the only one here operating on different physics._  
_

"What?"

Great. "Matches. You drag them along here," she said, demonstrating with her finger. (She didn't want to waste any.) "And they catch fire."

"Sweet! That should work," Tyx exclaimed, ogling the matches like a five-year-old with a working toy helicopter. Grease gave her just the tiniest of smiles, which for him was like Tyx almost falling into some lava with excitement... which he did. Twice.

"These are so _cool!_ How did you make them?"

Not wanting to get into it with Tyx about how matches worked, she kept silent. After a few more comments from Tyx that ran each other over and mixed up so much she couldn't actually tell what he was saying, they lapsed into a comfortable silence.

Then, it got less comfortable. By the time she realized what was happening, the awkward silence was so profound it swallowed up her words before she even _thought_ them.

"So," Tyx chirped, clapping his hands and destroying the quiet like an _elephant_ in a china shop. It was probably the most lamely nonchalant thing she had seen anyone do in this world so far, so she couldn't help laughing a little.

"Seriously though, what now?" he asked, trying hard to suppress an impish grin that sort of reminded her of the Stoll brothers.

"We walk," Grease stated flatly.

"Check," Tyx managed to dodge the massive backhand slap, which would've been friendly if the hand hadn't been made of stone and about the size of a large sledgehammer.

"Is there any way to find... whatever we're looking for faster?" she asked, hoping for some kind of magic compass.

"There is," Grease replied.

"What?" Tyx broke in, looking confused. "There is?"

"Walk faster."

* * *

Percy didn't like surprises, at least not the, "Haha, you've fallen into our trap" kind. In hindsight, it was pretty stupid to just wander into a cave with someone you met hiding out under the quicksand, _especially_ when you've just been teleported to what looks and smells a lot like Tartarus. Still, tricking him was _not cool_.

"Emma? Who is this?" demanded the guy holding Percy by his shirt collar, which was _very_ uncomfortable.

"Um."

"_Emma_," the voice repeated, sounding angry. If he could talk through the fist in his face, Percy might have said the same thing, plus a few Greek words he'd learned from Annabeth.

"He's new-spawn! One of us!"

"Remember _Ryan?_" asked another voice accusingly, this time female. Ryan? That didn't sound very scary.

"Yes..." Emma said in a quiet voice. "But this one didn't even know what a new-spawn _was!_"

"Neither did Ryan. It's easy to pretend, Emma," another voice chimed in, sounding like the owner was making a huge effort to be patient. Past the front of his shirt, which the fist that still hadn't moved ‒ even though Percy knew he was pretty heavy ‒ was still holding, he could just make out something very blue in the direction of the speaker.

"But he's _nice!_" Emma protested. Percy was starting to get the uncomfortable feeling that his life was hinging on the arguments of a kindergartner.

"Emma..." the gruff voice of shirt-holder warned.

"But he _is!_" A very stubborn kindergartner... but not exactly his ideal lawyer. Percy tried to speak, to say that he was, in fact, _super_ nice, but all that came out of his crushed lungs was a raspy croak.

"Icee!" Wait, what? Icee?! "You're _crushing him!_"

"Fine."

The hand relaxed, letting Percy slump to the ground in an embarrassed heap of limbs. Getting to his feet was made somewhat difficult by a large boot placed menacingly on his stomach.

"But we _can't_ mess this up now."

The all too familiar rasp of a sword being drawn echoed throughout the room...

* * *

Piper had never liked nightmares, and not usually just because they were scary. For one thing, there was always the chance they were demigod dreams that would eventually come true, which was enough to make anyone anxious.

But sometimes, they were just really uncomfortable. As she lay on something cold and damp, with an icy wind biting into her and going right through her clothes, her skin, and maybe even her bones, she really wished she could wake up and be back under her fluffy green comforter ‒ she had discreetly disposed of the baby pink one ‒ with easy access to a hot shower, maybe some tea... a pot of boiling water...

It was _really_ cold.

Tentatively, she opened one eye, wondering what horrors she would have to blunder through this time, before her alarm clock would _finally _ go off. Nightmares weren't exactly _regular_, but still, she knew her way around her dreams.

She cracked the eye open... and froze. Why was she floating? And why was everything so _vivid?_ This was way more realistic than her dreams usually were. Was this a vision... or...

Oh. The spell... curse... whatever it was.

Somehow, she felt a bit cheated. How was it fair to teleport her in her sleep? Wait, _how was she floating?!_

In her panic, she almost slid over the edge. Beneath her, to her relief, was some kind of stone walkway (A slick, damp stone walkway) that her head was hanging off of. If that wasn't enough, the ground, far, far below, _almost_ as long a fall as the Grand Canyon, looked... strange. It was all white, like snow, but somehow fluffy-looking.

_Oh_. Clouds? _Clouds?!_

"Oh‒"

* * *

**Heehee... double cliffie! :D  
**

**Sorry. :/ It was getting really long, so I wanted to end it off. Might've bitten off a bit more than I can chew with so many perspectives, but _so be it!_ :)**

**BAI!**

**GOD DANGIT NOW THE EDIT DOCUMENT OPTION IS BEING A DERP! #$# $# $ RAAAWR! And my computer thinks it's _hilarious_ to have firefox completely fail in the middle of editing. Ha. Ha. -.-**

**Now, I SHALL SLEEP! :D**


End file.
